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Athlete Diary Entry: Megan McTavish from Cowgirl Country
By:  Megan McTavish   (2005/11/15)

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This is the first year in a long time that I have been injury, surgery and school free. In the last few years I have kept myself busy with knee surgery, two ankle surgeries and a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering. This year I have spent the fall in Canmore training and working the odd job (and by odd I mean digging out a basement by hand, delivering flyers, making beds and cleaning houses) a couple of days a week. I am starting to get soft!

I have been in Canmore since September and have enjoyed a great variety of training, work and entertainment. Most of my work has been in the construction business. There are a lot of new houses going up in the area so casual work isn’t hard to come by. Lately I have been cleaning houses before occupancy.

I have been lucky enough to join different groups for training (Foothills and Rocky Mountain Racers). This has been a good way to experience some new (sometimes very painful) workouts. We have been skiing here since October 22 starting at the Sunshine downhill resort in Banff and moving on to Moraine Lake road at Lake Louise and Mt. Shark (45 min from Canmore). My main focus for the early part of this year is the qualifying races for the World Cups in Canmore and Silver Star. Because of this, my biggest training volume came earlier than other years so lately we have been doing relatively low hours but quite a bit of intensity. This intensity has been a mix of short hard intervals, longer hill intervals and time trials. Today we did our first time trial of the season and it looks like things are pretty well on track.

Of course, all work and no play would make me a dull girl so I have made sure to be a tourist on a few occasions. I have hiked up a few different mountains, gone to the Haig glacier, driven through Roger’s Pass to Revelstoke (which is where I lived as a kid) and have gone to Banff and Lake Louise. Canmore has been a great place to train this fall. There has been lots of opportunity to ski early, I am used to the altitude here (frequently a bit of a challenge for us Easterners in early season racing) and the lifestyle has been very relaxed. Going into the early season races I feel prepared and excited. We leave in less than a week and we are looking forward to joining up with the rest of the team there. We will keep you updated!


 
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